New Delhi: An interview with a Wuhan University biostatistics professor has sparked new speculations that Covid-19 maybe have been detected three weeks before from what the Beijing authorities have reported.
In the interview with Chinese medical journal, Health Times the professor talked about one suspected fatality of a patient who fell ill in September 2019 and eventually died.
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According to a Daily Mail report, Professor Yu Chuanhua told Health Times that he had 47,000 cases on his national database of confirmed and suspected cases by late February 2020. 'These included one suspected fatality of a patient who fell ill in late September 2019', the report said.
‘There is data on a patient who became ill on September 29,’ he told Health Times according to Daily Mail. ‘The data shows the patient has not undergone nucleic testing and the clinical diagnosis is a suspected case. The patient has died. The data has not been confirmed.’
Who is Paitent Su
According to the report, a 61 year old woman whose record was under the name of Patient Su who was treated at Rongjun Hospital in Wuhan. In the screenshot accidentally shared, the building and the street number as found in hospital records, it is believed that the woman lived somewhere n the Kaile Guiyan community on Zhuodaoquan Street. It is very close to where several bat-related research was taking place. "These include a laboratory run by China’s Centre for Disease Control with the second-highest global levels of biosecurity little more than one mile away, while downtown sites run by Wuhan Institute of Virology are less than three miles away," Daily Mail said.
She was also close to a stop for the high-speed rail line that is believed to have played a key role in spreading the virus around the city of 11 million people.
However, within two days Professor Yu retracted his statement and claimed that the dates had been entered incorrectly and all the other suspected cases before December 8 needed verification. The Daily Mail further reported, that this interview took place on the day 'China’s health authorities issued a silencing gag on the novel coronavirus as President Xi Jinping tried to regain control of the situation'.